25 August 2008

Ross Dawson blogged recently on research by the University of Massachusetts into Social Media use in the 500 fastest growing, private companies in the USA.

The longitudinal study suggests that Social Media use is not just increasing within this business sector, but was more prolific in general when compared with the Fortune 500. Privately owned companies seem to be more open to social media technologies.

My experience bears this out in Australia. Two companies I am involved with in Melbourne fit the findings. The private one is using social media and the public one, although taking a few pokes, has yet to gain executive support to get even a pilot under way despite some interest being shown by middle management.

Maybe it's the organic implementation model that's to blame? While I am somewhat generalising, the public company is looking for turn-key solutions to business problems that can make reportable results to their stakeholders. The private one failed first with forums, adopted IM and evolved usage guidelines to handle the issues the multiple time zones can bring. Then a small wiki which started as a project information management tool has become a key tool for several divisions and is starting to do double duty as a company Intranet.

From a research perspective, my study of five Australian SMEs is showing some similar findings. The "Inc. 500" study notes that not only is the adoption "being driven by strong familiarilty", but the number of companies claiming Social Media technologies are "very important" rose from 26% to 44% in a single year.

Likewise, my study indicates that where wiki technologies have been implemented and perceived successful, the actual implementaiton time is very quick; in one case just two months from adoption to full usage and distributing the workload of the documentation project from a single writer previously to a collaborative effort of 17 operations staff.

Social Media seems to be more than just a business fashion. Several studies, including my own are now uncovering real business benefits to these technologies and the cultures of community and collaboration they engender. It will be interesting indeed to see how the continue to evolve over the next few years. I am also interested in how the continuing development of public Web 2.0 solutions will effect the Enterprise 2.0 landscape through both1) the devlopment of new interfaces/tools/solutions, and also2) via users becoming more familiar with the use of them.

23 August 2008

If you work in KM and are based in Australia, Cory Banks is running an anonymous survey to determine Salary information which will be presented on the www.auskm.com site and communicated to various Australian KM networks.

03 August 2008

James Robertson from Step Two recently spoke at the Open Publish conferencein Sydney on the topic collaboration.

He has posted the presentation - with audio - on the web and I thought I would share it with you as it has a few nice parts you will usually online find out AFTER you pay the consultant to help you :-)

His ten tips for succeeding at collaboration include the concepts of community, etc but also encourage you to ask more pragmatic questions such as where is best fits in your organisation.

If you have heard about collaboration (as opposed to cooperation) and are wondering what your next steps are to start implementing it in your organisation, this is 40-odd minutes well spent.

01 August 2008

Anthropologists, particularly of the US persuasion, have been studying culture for many years.

Along with that study, a theory of culture has been evolving over the years. What is culture? How do we build a model of it so we can predict what part culture plays in our communities and societies? Good questions, but as it turns out, quite hard to answer.

The theory of culture has evolved. As recently as 15 years ago books were still being sold to business people declaring culture as an attribute or an indefinable object associated to a group of people, such as a company. Big names, like Geert Hofstede started to acknowledge the part the human mind plays in culture, particularly through learning, however his focus on very large groups (nations and massive multi-national corporations) caused issues when applied to communities with less than 5000 members. "Organizational Communication and Culture" by Morley1 is just one study that (mis)applies Hofstede's cultural themes in this way.

The combination of cognition with cultural theory has given culture theory predictive ability in smaller groups and researchers like Strauss & Quinn, "A cognitive theory of cultural meaning" have managed to bring knowledge from both anthropology and psychology to form a new model for the theory.

Two years ago I wrote an assignment on cultural theory and its history from a Knowledge Management point of view for my Masters degree if you would like to read more about it.

Today I came across a book called Cultural Complexity by Hannerz and I thought I would share a few quotes from it that I found useful in understanding both the conformity and variation aspects of culture:

I find the flow metaphor useful - for one thing, because it captures one of the paradoxes of culture. When you see a river from afar, it may look like a blue (or green or brown) line across a landscape; something of awesome permanence. But at the same time, "you cannot step into the same river twice," for it is always moving, and only in this way does it achieve its durability. The same way with culture - even as you perceive structure, it is entirely dependent on ongoing process. p.4

Of course my focus os on the intersection of culture and Information Technologies:

"The defining feature of the media is the use of technology to achieve as externalisation of meaning in such a way that people can communicate with one another without being in one another's immediate presence; media are machineries of meaning. Of such technologies there is little in the small scale societies of the world: drum languages, smoke signals. Otherwise, the cultures of small-scale societies are cultures of face-to-face, oral flows of meaning. The cultures of complex societies, on the other hand, now make use of writing, print, radio, telephones, telegraph, photography, film, disk and tape recording, television, video and computers. Yet only the implications of literacy have really, and only rather lately, claimed a more noticeable share of the awareness of anthropologists. pp. 26-27

...the increase in information, or knowledge, is in part a consequence of changes in modes of managing ideas, with a greater emphasis on more expansionist modes, thus involving the first of the dimensions of culture identified above, and in part this increase also results from a changing relationship between the first and the second dimensions, between "things of the mind" and externalisations. New technology allows more knowledge to be externally stored and on other ways managed.

But the third dimension, that of distribution, is also profoundly affected by the characteristics of the information society, and has a major part in the debates surrounding it. If there is "information overload" and "information anxiety," it is to a great extent because people cannot confidently enough manage the relationship between the entire cultural inventory and their reasonable personal share in it. pp. 31-32

I used to hate obscure, academic discussions about these topics. As I have come to see the sometimes scary results of management decisions based on the old, simple views of culture, I have found these insights helpful at both understanding and managing complex corporate environments. I encourage you to ask yourself how you would define "culture" and how your definition effects the way you lead others.

About me

I am a Knowledge Management Consultant and also Facilitate the Knowledge Management Roundtable for SIRF. I help companies with expertise identification & mgt, collaboration, teamwork and knowledge systems to improve an organisation's performance and resilience to change.
I have completed a Masters thesis on Wiki use in Small to Medium Enterprises through the University of South Australia.